Let There Be Water: Israel's Solution for a Water-Starved World

Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also has an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors - the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan - every day.

Lauren says:"Israel's history and current approach to water abundance"

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century

Throughout history, rivers have been our foremost source of fresh water both for agriculture and for individual consumption, but now economists say that by 2025 water scarcity will cut global food production by more than the current U.S. grain harvest. In this groundbreaking book, veteran science correspondent Fred Pearce focuses on the dire state of the world's rivers to provide our most complete portrait yet of the growing world water crisis and its ramifications for us all.

Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What to do About it

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas casinos use billions of gallons of water for fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and indoor canals. Meanwhile, the town of Orme, Tennessee, must truck in water from Alabama because it has literally run out.Robert Glennon captures the irony - and tragedy - of America’s water crisis in a book that is both frightening and wickedly comical.

Drinking Water: A History

When you turn on the tap or twist the cap, you might not give a second thought to where your drinking water comes from. But how it gets from the ground to your glass is far more complex than you might think. Is it safe to drink tap water? Should you feel guilty buying bottled water? Is your water vulnerable to terrorist attacks? With springs running dry and reservoirs emptying, where is your water going to come from in the future? In Drinking Water, Duke professor James Salzman shows how drinking water highlights the most pressing issues of our time.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell phone service, and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens.

Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America's Drinking Water

Bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. But what's the cost of all this water for us and for the environment? In this eye-opening book, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Michael Pollan did for food: She examines the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that surround it on its journey from distant aquifers to our supermarkets and homes.

Blue Future: Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever

In her best-selling books Blue Gold and Blue Covenant, world-renowned water activist Maude Barlow exposed the battle for ownership of our dwindling water supply and the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to reclaim water as a public good. Since then, the United Nations has recognized access to water as a basic human right - but there is still much work to be done to stem this growing crisis.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another, this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance.

Lyddie

When Lyddie and her younger brother are hired out as servants to help pay off their family farm's debts, Lyddie is determined to find a way to reunite her family once again. Hearing about all the money a girl can make working in the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, she makes her way there, only to find that her dreams of returning home may never come true.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World

Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.

A Long Walk to Water

In 1985 southern Sudan is ravaged by war. Rebels and government forces battle for control, with ordinary people…people like the boy, Salva Dut…caught in the middle. When Salva's village is attacked, he must embark on a harrowing journey that will propel him through horror and heartbreak, across a harsh desert, and into a strange new life. Years later, in contemporary South Sudan, a girl named Nya must walk eight hours a day to fetch water. The walk is grueling, but there is unexpected hope.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.

Make It in America: The Case for Re-Inventing the Economy

We used to make things in this country. We were the dazzling innovators, the undisputed world economic leaders, and with our manufacturing engine driving the process, we built a solid, high-achieving middle class. Now, thanks to policies that are either indifferent - or downright hostile - to manufacturing, we're at the brink of losing it all. If you think this won't affect you, guess again. Author Andrew N. Liveris presents a powerful case for the critical importance of domestic manufacturing.

The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure

Physical infrastructure in the United States is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers has, in its latest report, given American roads and bridges a grade of D and C+, respectively, and has described roughly 65,000 bridges in the United States as 'structurally deficient'. This crisis - and one need look no further than the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota to see that it is indeed a crisis - shows little sign of abating short of a massive change in attitude amongst politicians and the American public.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World

How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings? Research is now suggesting trees are capable of much more than we have ever known. In The Hidden Life of Trees, forester Peter Wohlleben puts groundbreaking scientific discoveries into a language everyone can relate to.

Inside Out and Back Again

Written in rich, free-verse poems, this moving tale follows a young Vietnamese girl as she leaves her war-torn homeland for America in 1975. With Saigon about to fall to the communists, 10-year-old Hà, her mother, and brothers are forced to flee their beloved city and head to the United States. But living in a new country isn’t easy for Hà, and she finds adapting to its strange customs ever challenging.

The Science of Energy: Resources and Power Explained

To better put into perspective the various issues surrounding energy in the 21st century, you need to understand the essential science behind how energy works. And you need a reliable source whose focus is on giving you the facts you need to form your own educated opinions.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: Young Readers Edition

"What's for dinner?" seemed like a simple question - until journalist and supermarket detective Michael Pollan delved behind the scenes. From fast food and big organic to small farms and old-fashioned hunting and gathering, this young readers' adaptation of Pollan's famous food-chain exploration encourages kids to consider the personal and global health implications of their food choices.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

A major audiobook about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes. Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Ranchers Are Tending the Soil to Reverse Global Warming

In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water

Bottled & Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last 100 years - and why we are poorer for it. It's a big story and water is big business. Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottle of water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one of those bottles away. That adds up to more than 30 billion bottles a year and tens of billions of dollars of sales. Are there legitimate reasons to buy all those bottles?

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe

In Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen - the nation's leading scientist on climate issues - speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: the planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although Hansen was Al Gore's science adviser for the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change. It is a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. From the jammed streets of Beijing to the shores of the Caspian Sea, from the conflicts in the Mideast to Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley, Yergin takes us into the decisions that are shaping our future.

Publisher's Summary

The water coming out of your tap is four billion years old and might have been slurped by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We will always have exactly as much water on Earth as we have ever had. Water cannot be destroyed, and it can always be made clean enough for drinking again. In fact, water can be made so clean that it actually becomes toxic. As Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this delightful narrative excursion, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, which is both the promise and the peril of our unexplored connections to it.

Taking listeners from the wet moons of Saturn to the water-obsessed hotels of Las Vegas, and from a rice farm in the Australian outback to a glimpse into giant vats of soup at Campbell's largest factory, he reveals that our relationship to water is conflicted and irrational, neglected and mismanaged. Whether we will face a water scarcity crisis has little to do with water and everything to do with how we think about water - how we use it, connect with it, and understand it.

Portraying and explaining both the dangers - in 2008, Atlanta came just 90 days from running completely out of drinking water - and the opportunities, such as advances in rainwater harvesting and businesses that are making huge breakthroughs in water productivity, The Big Thirst will forever change the way we think about water, our crucial relationship to it, and the creativity we can bring to ensuring we always have plenty of it.

Charles Fishnman, also the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, has returned with a book on water. It is a look at water through history, its use over the last 100 years, and the current issues involving its distribution. BUT WAIT, there is more, don't touch that dial...Fishman brings the reader up to speed on the current water enviornment. This is an interesting book that will be enjoyed by a broad section of the reading public. Fishman is informative, the book is well written and issues are covered in a thoughtful way. Of particular help, is Fishman's extensive descriptions of cities and towns around the world and how they are dealing with water supply. I came away from the volume with my eyes opened to the problems we face and the opportunities that are apparent. The reading of Stephen Hoye is excellent.

This is a superb book and one that should be required reading for every human being. Instead of reading some of the drivel (classics) in high school, kids should read about the single most important element in life, water. There is something enigmatic about our attitude about water. Our attitude about water is something akin to the old song line, "you only really appreciate something when you lose it". This book is not a polemic or screaming about yet another crisis. Although water is becoming a crisis, his point is educational. He talks about every aspect of water. I especially like the parts in which he described the chemistry and physical uniqueness of water. One fact about water that absolutely blew me away: Every molecule of water that is on the Earth has been here since its formation. We neither add nor subtract water. It just gets moved around. We are so spoiled regarding water in the US especially in the part in which I live. He points out the confusion in our minds about water. The author compares our 24/7 water accessibility with the supply in India. In most Indian communities, even the wealthy ones, water is only available one or two hours a day. In some parts of India, an entire day is consumed (mainly by school aged girls) walking to a distant water supply and carrying it back on their heads. For us, water is virtually free and we waste it with impunity. People complain about a dollar a month increase in the cost of water supply while they remain silent about a 10% cable TV charge. Is it really necessary to flush our solid waste with purified, chemically treated potable water? Suffice it to say that after reading this book, my head was straightened out and I now turn off the water when brushing my teeth. The book is very well written and Charles Fishman does a great job, as always. This book gets my vote for Science book of the year.

Books about environmental and economic issues are always kind of depressing, because it's really easy to show examples of how very badly we are hoisting ourselves on our own petard on an epic scale. Like most authors of such books, Charles Fishman shows us how very, very bad it's getting and then tries to end on an optimistic note: "Hey, we have the technology and the science, and if we just behave like rational adults who know we're all in this together, we can solve this problem!"

Uh huh, how often does that happen?

Some interesting points to ponder:

1. The Earth will never "run out" of water. The Earth has exactly the same amount of water today that it did a billion years ago and will have in a billion years. It doesn't go away, it doesn't get destroyed, it just gets recycled.

2. Every drop of water you drink was once dinosaur pee. Probably millions of times over.

3. It's been shown repeatedly that people given access to relatively unlimited, cheap water use less water than people whose water supply is sporadic and uncertain, because people who can't count on their water supply tend to horde water, which leads to more wastage.

4. There are potentially oceans-full of "deep water" locked in the Earth's crust, miles down. Unfortunately, no technology currently known to us would make it possible to access it.

There are a lot of other interesting not-so-random facts in this book. But "The Big Thirst" is about water, and water management, and the economics of water. Basically, we have too many people and not enough water. Except that's not precisely true- we have enough water. We just don't distribute it or manage it wisely. Fishman talks about the extraordinary growth of water technology in the 20th century - how something we now take for granted (in the U.S.), that when you turn on the tap, safe, unlimited, practically free drinking water will come out, is a tectonic shift in culture. People used to have to spend hours every day just to haul enough water to live on. About half the world still does (and this burden mostly falls on women, with many long-term secondary consequences).

Fishman examines three main "case studies" - Las Vegas, Australia, and India. Las Vegas, of course, is a city built in the middle of a desert where people come and pay hundreds of dollars a night to sleep in hotel rooms overlooking enormous water fountains. Vegas's water supply from Lake Mead has been getting sparser and sparser. In response, they have made a number of very intelligent water choices and imposed restrictions that would seem insane in much of the U.S., yet Vegas residents have shown it's perfectly possible to live comfortably under a water-conservation regime. And yet, they still irrigate luxury golf courses in a desert. And yet, they still use (and waste) less water than farmers.

Australia is also suffering from years and years of drought, which does not look to be ending any time soon unless you believe the global warming denialists. One of Australia's major crops is rice. Yes, Australians raise rice - a very water-intensive crop - in the desert. Seems like madness, but it made perfect sense when rain was plentiful and rivers were flowing. Now there are rivers that have literally dried up, and if you do believe in climate change, then they are probably not coming back in our lifetimes. There is a certain futility in the attitude of the rice farmers whose "solution" is basically to hope the rains come again.

There's also an interesting story about a town that could have solved its water shortage problems easily by using waste-water - very clean and efficient sewage treatment plants - except the residents went nuts at the idea of drinking "sewer water" (even though, see above, every drop of water you drink has been urine many, many times for millions of years). More and more cities are in fact now using waste-water and desalinization to provide much of their water. (Desalinization, unfortunately, is not a magical process that turns seawater into drinking water with merely an investment in a plant. It has a massive energy cost - in other words, it's likely to increase global warming — and all that salt you extract has to go somewhere.)

Then there is India. Where even rich people tend to have erratic public water and supply themselves through inefficient, wasteful, technically illegal jury-rigged supply lines filled by private water trucks. Where millions of girls basically can't go to school because they are too busy fetching water for their families. (And because they have no toilets at school that any human being would want to use.) India also has massive water problems, but ironically, they are worse now than they were in the 70s, because what was once a fairly workable public water system has been allowed to fall apart.

So, all these problems, which are in fact solvable, but they are solvable through a combination of technological, economic, and social means which will require people act like responsible adults on a global scale. Although Fishman makes the point several times that even if the residents of California suddenly implemented heroic water-saving measures, it wouldn't do a thing for the water needs of people in India or Australia.

We are really foolish about water, and water is going to become a more pressing problem than oil in the next fifty years in some parts of the world.

An interesting if somewhat gloomy book (unless you're a really optimistic futurist). I thought Fishman belabored some points a bit, and was a little too trusting in the magic of "the market" to solve our water problems if applied correctly, but the basic point that people don't value something they get for nothing has been born out.

The big idea in Charles Fishman's excellent The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water is that water is both an essential and scarce resource, and that almost universally governments and individuals have failed to manage this resource.Our water failures are across the board.We have failed to:

Put a realistic price on water consumption, allowing politics and sheer lunacy to determine who uses water and how much they use rather than the market and mechanisms of supply and demand.

Maintain, much less improve, our existing century old water infrastructure (the pipes, pumping stations, waste treatment facilities, reservoirs, etc) - leading to enormous water wastage and risks of water delivery failure.

Manage existing water supplies intelligently, including our failures to appropriately conserve and re-use water, and our continued insistence on sending high quality drinking water into our toilets and on to our yards and golf courses.Educate ourselves about water and the water supply.

This last failure is, I think, particularly troubling across higher ed. Our students are not going to understand water locally, nationally or globally unless we teach them about water. Water can unify disciplines of economics, sociology, history, political science, chemistry, biology, environmental studies, and many more. We could use water as a lens to understand the interactions of science, history and politics. Water represents a teachable moment.

Fishman tells the water story by going to places and talking with people who are grappling with the management and delivery of water and water systems. From Vegas to India, Atlanta to Dubai, water economics and water politics are dominating the thinking and planning efforts of many companies and governments. The ed tech folks amongst us will particularly enjoy the description of how water is utilized in the making of computer chips (and be amazed how much embedded water is in your iPad).

My goal is always to learn something from the books I listen to, but sometimes it's endurance work to finish a science, biology, or even history related book. In the midst of many educational books I keep promising myself I'll indulge on a fun novel next, and take a break from the learning. This was not the case at all with The Big Thirst. I enjoyed every minute of this book, and because I enjoyed it so much, I probably learned more (and will retain more) than with any other educational book I've listened to.

My family is probably getting tired of hearing stories and facts about water at dinner each night. To me this book was awesome. I learned a ton about our world's most precious resource, and thoroughly enjoyed doing it. Fishman writes with wit and humor, and knows how to keep things interesting as well as informative. The major stories he covers in the book are all very interesting.

As I re-read through many of the reviews on this book I was amazed to see some people say it is a "doomsday" type book about our world's water problems. I didn't get that at all. It is true today that more and more people are recognizing the importance of water availability for our futures, but he doesn't hype up this fear. I think the goal of The Big Thirst is just to make people stop and consider water, something we live most of our lives completely taking for granted.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO EVERYONE. No matter what type of books you enjoy listening to, I promise you will connect with the subject matter in this book, and enjoy learning as you listen to it.

When Al Gore released his movie, An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, it won an Academy Award for best documentary. Charles Fishman should win some kind of award in "The Big Thirst" because this could be another documentary that could overwhelm the screens. The Pulitzer Prize should give an award to Fishman in this category because this is the best informational book thus far.

Water is a natural resource that we need to survive no matter what is your economical status and no matter where you live. If you want to know everything about water, such as Las Vegas or how they meter water in different metropolis or not having 24 hour of service that people in America takes for granted, then, this will be your best book that you will ever read.

You don't have to be an environmentalist to be concern of water. I don't recycle, drive a gas guzzler, and like having more nuclear power plants, but I can't stand a drippy faucet or a running toilet.

For many reasons, I had high expectations for this book: a trusted friend’s recommendation; the high Amazon/Audible ratings; and Fishman’s track record (the Wal-Mart Effect).

By no means is the book a dud, but it’s not profound either. Here are my main two beefs and then I’ll spend some time explaining what the book does well.

First, unnecessary repetition pervades the entire book. For example, the first chapter is dedicated almost entirely to describing how water is enmeshed in all aspects of our lives. It keeps going long after its point has been made. Even the repetition of the word “water” – repeated well over 100 times in the first chapter and appearing multiple times in nearly every paragraph – grated on me (at least listening to the audio). In later chapters, Fishman repeats this tendency, not just leaving no stone unturned, but turning the same stones over, again and again.

Second, while Chapter 1 tells us that there’s a “new era of water” coming, Fishman’s more nuanced thesis doesn’t start to crystalize until later in the book.

My advice, should you choose to read this book, is to start by listening to the last chapter first. There, Fishman makes clear that this book is not an alarmist book or doomsday prophecy. Instead, we learn that the book’s core message is this: when the externalities of water use are not priced into consumption, water consumers make poor, non-sustainable decisions. No surprise there. And, hearteningly, when there’s an economic incentive to manage water use such as for large consumers of water (e.g., computer chip manufacturers, large hotels), those large consumers make smart decisions that cut costs and save water resources. Fishman also provides cautionary examples where municipalities failed to undertake needed water innovation because of politics, inertia, and outdated expectations about water.

Finally, the narrator is one of my least favorites for reaons I can’t quite put my finger on.

One basic premise of this book is the fact that all the water on Earth has been here since the beginning of time. It is not being created, and it is not being destroyed. It is just constantly moving and being recycled. Odds are, much of the water molecules you will drink today have been urinated by dinosaurs, many... many... times in the past.

The author also presents numerous case studies of modern cities and their relationships/ challenges/ initiatives with water. Just a few of the many, diverse locals detailed are Las Vegas, Delhi, Perth...

I was not sure if this book was going to be dry in the opening chapter but quickly developed a thirst for more. Each chapter is extremely informative yet entertaining to read(listen). The written style is kept concise and translates well into an audiobook. It is clear this book has been researched and strands from case studies are intermingled making it easy to remember what came previously if listening in instalments. I work in the water industry and learned much from this book. I am likely to refer to examples and anecdotes in conversation in the future. A very enjoyable and thought provoking book. Thank you.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

J

Dun Laoghaire, Ireland

5/30/11

Overall

"1st chapter good"

I got this because of a good review in "Nature". The first chapter is really interesting. However later on it is highly focussed on America. I am finding it hard to be interested in the water usage of golf courses and hotel washing machines in Las Vagas. Not sure if I will finish this!
I suspect the other reviewer only read the first chapter!!

1 of 2 people found this review helpful

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